Friday’s Cal Performances Gala was its first in seven years, and not to get too highfalutin with the words, because the whole tone of the event was to let the music reign and not to get too highfalutin with the trappings — the gowns were not the point — it was a big hit. In the highlight of the night, a concert reviewed by Joshua Kosman, 6,000 music lovers watched the full moon rise over the Greek Theatre as Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, with singers from Bay Area choruses of adults and kids.

At the end of that performance — broadcast live over KDFC and KUSC, webcast over Univision, Medici.TV, Cal Performances and Dudamel sites — the crowd wouldn’t leave, the cheering demanding that the conductor be brought back to receive the ovations. But “receive” isn’t really what Dudamel does. When the piece ends, the conductor doesn’t turn to acknowledge the shouts and applause pouring forth. Instead, he steps off the podium and wades into the orchestra before him, picking his way among the seats to congratulate soloists and musicians, one section at a time. After wending his way through the crowd of musicians, he walks into the wings, carefully staying behind the row of violinists’ seats closest to the edge of the stage, playfully slapping the shoulders of a few seated closest to the exit. Called back to the spotlight when the applause continues to thunder, he smiles, but he never squarely faces the audience, deflecting the applause from himself and to all the other concert participants.

Because he’d been called to New York to perform on Sunday at the United Nations, he stopped by only briefly at the dinner that followed. When he walked in, side by side with Cal Performances executive and Artistic Director Matías Tarnopolsky, he was smiling but certainly not basking in the applause that greeted him.

It’s just who Dudamel is, said composer John Adams, informally chatting at the end of dinner, it’s how he always conducts himself. To the musicians who work with him, Adams added, he’s also an incredibly quick study, and eager, particularly in his role as conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic, to take on “really difficult contemporary music.”

The musician is a man of the people. But not one-dimensional. Earlier in the week, said Maria Manetti Shrem, who with her husband, Jan Shrem, had supported the orchestra’s residency at Cal Performances, she’d invited Dudamel and Tarnopolsky to lunch. She’s a gracious hostess, and when she served them blini, caviar and Champagne, she said, Dudamel told her, “Yesterday I was just thinking about caviar.”

Said Maria Shrem, “He’s everything I love.” The first time they met, after an L.A. Phil performance of Mahler’s Eighth, “I told him when it ended, I had tears in my eyes. And he started crying, too.”

The orchestra’s residency was the first event of Berkeley Radical (Research and Development Initiative in Creativity, Arts and Learning), which will undoubtedly feature programs more unforgettable than its acronym. On this warm evening (thank you planners Helen Meyer and Maris Meyerson for pashminas at every dinner seat, in case it hadn’t been), more than $500,000 was raised for arts education, and Radical was off and running.

It’s not too late to extend Jewish high fives to you and to The Chronicle’s David Steinberg, who went to Yom Kippur services at Temple Beth Abraham in Oakland. When an adolescent boy who was to have a role in the services couldn’t participate, Rabbi Mark Bloom drafted his son. Looking around for a spare prayer shawl for young Bloom, the rabbi found one stored in a plastic bag, with a tag inside with the name of its former owner: Al Davis. Thus was the iconic Raiders team owner participating in the Day of Atonement even after his death.

Today’s drought tip: Pat McCulloch was inspired by listening to the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.” It didn’t bring on rain, but it gave him the sense he’d done his best. So I proclaim a statewide Water Day, where “Singin’ in the Rain” is played on PA systems, oldies radio stations play “Splish Splash,” classical ones play Handel’s “Water Music” and C&W stations stay tuned to “Down by the Riverside.”